Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu Page B

to the light. It looked exactly like a baby’s disposable diaper, only larger, as though it was made for a mutant, the kind they used to make bad movies about in the fifties. Two blue buttons were sewn to the front to hook it up with. I pressed it to my face. It smelled of plastic and cardboard and glue.
    I pulled my jeans off and my panties down and slipped into the diaper and buttoned it up. I felt anxious and excited as I stood there, hunched over because of the low ceiling. The plastic felt warm against my skin. I dug in my jeans, produced a pack of cigarettes, Kools, and a book of matches. I tapped one out against my wrist, placed it in my mouth, and lit it. I stood there for a minute smoking, thinking something should happen, something magical and strange. I should instantly be transported into another dimension where the rules of the universe were reversed, where black was white, where up was down, where the world I knew had never so much as been imagined.
    Because there I was, standing in the closet, smoking, wearing an adult diaper.
    But nothing happened. I stubbed the cigarette out, pulled the diaper off, and replaced it in the box.
    Johnny was in the backyard, playing on the swing. Papa sat in the shade in a deck chair, his pink turban lopsided on his head. I could tell he was watching Johnny from the way his head moved back and forth with the motion of the swing.
    I found Mom in the kitchen. She was chopping chicken with a cleaver.
    “Can I put the diaper on Papa now?” I said.
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “It’s for training.”
    “Training?”
    “I’m planning to be a nurse.”
    Mom looked at me with concern. She always did when I voiced any ambition.
    She shook her head. “I want your father to do it.”
    I was leaving when Mom said, “What’s that smell?”
    “What smell?”
    “Come here.”
    She pushed her nose into my hair. My heart began to explode in my chest.
    “New shampoo?” she said.
    “Yes,” I said. “Peppermint. Like gum.”
    Dad appeared late at dinner that night, one arm around Papa, whom he helped down the stairs. When Papa was settled in his special chair, Dad poured himself a large whisky, no ice, and drank it in a single toss. He poured himself a second before joining us at the table.
    No one spoke out loud. Only Johnny and me whispered almost silently to each other.
    “Fuckwad,” Johnny said.
    “Butt plug,” I said.
    My name that night was Cassiopeia.
    Later, I heard Dad on the phone.
    “I hate him,” he said.
    I was listening in on the extension downstairs as he talked to his sister. “If I could . . .”
    “Yes?” she said.
    “I would.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t have the guts.”
    “He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s our father.”
    “I know.”
    “I hate him as much as you do,” she said. “More.”
    “Yes?”
    “I couldn’t. Not ever.”
    “I know.”
    “You won’t do anything?”
    “I’m a coward,” Dad said.
    I stopped listening when he said that. I hate cowards. I returned the phone loudly into the cradle and walked up the stairs to my room and banged my door shut.
    Soon after, I heard footsteps outside my door. I knew it was Dad, I recognized the way he walked. I could sense him standing there, holding a hand up as if to knock. He stood there for about a minute before I heard the steps move away.
    From that day on, when Dad called his sister, he used a cell phone.
    I cut school at lunch and returned home to an empty house. I thought I’d watch the afternoon movie. I shouted up and down the stairs. “Mom, Papa.” No one. Maybe Mom had taken Papa out. I walked upstairs, excited by the freedom. I could hardly remember a time when I had the house entirely to myself. I stripped down to my underwear, slipped the pack of Kools into the elastic of my panties, lit a smoke, and began dancing along the hall.
    First into Johnny’s room, then Mom and Dad’s, finally into the spare bedroom, where Papa slept.
    I waltzed into Papa’s bathroom.